To all this must be added the prosperity of the decade. There was money for museums (new plant, new acquisitions) and for investment in private art galleries (Scull’s backing of the Green gallery, for instance, or the support that several supporters gave the Park Place Gallery which raised cooperatives to a new luxurious space). There was as well a willingness to pay high prices for new art, subject to elaborately negotiated discount: Harry Abrams, Leon Kraushaar, John Powers, Scull were among those who who attached the principle of conspicuous consumption to the newest art. by the end of the ’60s, however, the cluster of social injustice, Vietnam, and inflation had destroyed the favorable situation, for the art world as other sub groups. Robert K. Merton has proposed a method of studying social change: it is “the concept of dysfunction, which implies the concept of strain, stress, and tension on the structural level,” (28) of an organization. The smoothly functioning art world of the ’60s exhibits numerous dysfunctions now. The price and turnover of goods at galleries are down. The deficits of museums all over the country are getting harder to make up, sometimes resulting in violent abbreviation of services.

The confidence produced by the simultaneous success of two generations of American artists the delayed recognition of the older and the accelerated recognition of the younger generations coming together, promoted a sense of common identity. At first this amounted too little more than a loose agreement to being part of a professional group in a situation sufficiently stable not to demand continual conscious participation. By the late ’60s, however, artists had developed a sharper sense of themselves as a permanent interest. Typical of a new intransigence and desire to modify the form of distribution of art were the Art Workers coalition and the short-lived emergency Cultural Government, both of which presumed the need for reform of the market and institutions of the art world. Another sign is the move to protect the artist’s power of copyright by the Artist’s Reserve Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, a contract that a number of artists require their collectors to sign. (It provides for future remuneration if a work is resold at a higher price.) What has occurred, of course, is that the revival of ideology has extended to the art world. It take two forms: first, an increase in one’s own political commitment and, secondly, a fundamental skepticism concerning other positions. Ideology as a method or argument is corrosive in that it substitutes my interpretation for your motive. The discontent of many artists with galleries and museums therefore may amount to a fundamental re-orientation of attitude to the entire system that encloses their work.

To the militant artists who have a place in the system can be added other special interests, such as women artists and black artists. These groups include not only professional but lay artists who work outside the traditional options of 20th-century art in naive forms of realism, expressionism, and abstract design. There is a possibility that the pressure of lay art, the natural product of an educational system that has stressed both the need for art and the easiness of techniques for doing it, may introduce a real revision of our expectations of art in the next few years. If I am right, this pressure from below would be something like the literary history of tribes, cities, and provinces as discussed in the terms of local and indigenous characteristics. The sophistication that is a product of 20th-century information services makes it inevitable that the lay art movement will include people who use it for its career and political potential, but this does not invalidate it. It seems then that there have been a succession of crises at different points in the system that meets Merton’s requirement of “strain, stress, and tension on the structural level.”

It is worth remarking that a majority of writers and curators were trained as art historians. In fact, critics without art historical training often claim the role when all that is meant is an increase in the account of verifiable facts. (Speaking personally, what I write is art criticism with footnotes.) The profession of art historian now shares its own crises with other academic disciplines. It is orientated towards a set methodology suitable for research by graduate students whose incorporation in society afterwards is no longer assured. In the immediate future the important issues may be the devising of alternate methodologies and goals, including analysis of the teaching of undergraduates (who, for one thing, arrive at university with a built-in mastery of the fine art-pop art continuum). It seems possible that the art historian is being displaced as a model for critics, for the reasons given and also because of the activation of conscience by recent political events. This has lead to an ideological evaluation of historians’ supposedly objective techniques.